“Sure,” Annesthesia said, sounding irritated. “Spleen left like fifteen minutes ago—why aren’t you ready yet?”
“Ready for… what?”
“Don’t you check your emails? You have two clients waiting for a consult—”
“I’ve been with a client,” I snapped, “and I don’t check emails until—”
“Hell freezes over,” Annesthesia replied. “I’m sending them back now—”
“Wait,” I said, but the line clicked dead. Really. The waiting room was thirty feet away. She could have knocked or something. But Annesthesia is pretty, coquettish, and beautifully tattooed. Other than me, she’s our best advertisement—no, honestly, for straight guys, she is our best ad, since I can scare the little dears—so I put up with her.
I opened the door to the hall, hoping to intercept the visitors and draw them off to our “conference” room before they could see the mess which was my office, but stepped back in shock at the sight of a small but wiry old man with a flaring beard and hair. He was standing so close to the door it seemed like he’d materialized. Behind him, a dark-suited young man with blond hair smiled down at him, eyes lighting when he looked up and saw me. The kindly old man stepped forward, and my jaw dropped in more shock.
“Hello,” he said with a wicked, cheerful grin, devilish black eyebrows serving only to accent his twinkling blue eyes. “I’m Chris Valentine and this is my colleague, Alex Nicholson—”
“Christopher Valentine,” I breathed. “The Mysterious Mirabilus!”
7. THE VALENTINE CHALLENGE
The Mysterious Mirabilus smiled, and gave a slight bow. “The one and only.”
Christopher Valentine, AKA “The Mysterious Mirabilus,” was the world’s most famous magician—and debunker. Technically he was what real practitioners called an illusionist—someone who simulated magic through nonmagical means—but this Einstein-haired “illusionist” could do without magic things that most experienced sorcerers couldn’t do with magic. I mean, showy, big league stuff like walking on water, parting a small lake, and, most famously, appearing in two places at once, a trick he’d demonstrated on TV’s famous talk show way back when, The Night Shift with Jack Carterson.
I’d caught that one live. As a child, before I was old enough to know stage magic from real Magick, the Mysterious Mirabilus had been my hero, and I’d stayed up countless nights to catch his appearances performing his latest trick. By the time I grew older and had turned to real magic, the Miraculus Mirabilus had come out as Christopher Heywood Valentine, stage magician, and had turned his considerable talents to debunking what he considered “the flim-flammery of our age.” He traveled the country, issuing the Valentine Challenge to all magicians: to do a magic trick he couldn’t replicate under controlled conditions.
I know, I know, you’re thinking, charmingly nai’ve—no real practitioner would advertise themselves, and the rest are all charlatans, so why did I still idolize this guy? But like many other Edgeworlders, I find myself sifting through endless tomes of New Age fuffery looking for something real. Valentine’s probing books and debunking tours helped me winnow through the crap to get to the occasional nugget of gold.
And so—”I have all your books,” I blurted. Like a schoolgirl. How embarrassing.
But the Mysterious Mirabilus looked at me with sharp new interest. “How interesting,” he said, sitting in the client’s chair opposite me as I sat down at my desk. “That strikes me as very unusual. Given your profession.”
I grinned. “And why can’t a tattoo artist read Christopher Valentine?”
“I meant, as a professed magician,” Valentine said, all serious, dark pointy eyebrows beetling into a serious look of concern. He was much more interesting in person: on camera he looked all pale and WASPy, but with him sitting in my client’s chair I could see a slight Middle Eastern slant to his features and a subtle, swarthy tint to his skin that would have made it a wonderful canvas to ink on. “After all, I have spent the last few years of my life—”
“—exposing all the junk in the so-called ‘magickal’ world,” I replied, “freeing the rest of us practitioners to focus on the good stuff?”
Valentine and Nicholson looked at each other.
At this point I really noticed his colleague, Alex Nicholson: young, not too tall, tanned, with firm angular features that hinted at little or no body fat beneath his trim suit and turtleneck. Subtle, colored streaks wove through his wavy blond hair and the trimmed tuft on his chin. A single blue captive-bead ring hung in one ear. Like a slightly edgy Ken doll. Yummy.
“A skeptical witch,” Valentine said at last. “How about that.”